YouSaid · the spoken record

Glenn Fogel

lines on the record: 106
first: 2024-08-05
most recent: 2024-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“On how we handle all the different stakeholders in travel because it's not just the suppliers, it's not just the travelers and not just people like us who are helping to arrange them. People who live in these neighborhoods in sustainability, what about the environment? So we have a lot of things to think about as travel continues to increase in popularity, which it will. We'll have to think about those consequences and hopefully think long enough ahead that we can come up with the smart ways to handle it in a fair way.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's next is remembering these truisms. People will always want to travel. One of the first things people do when they go from poverty to lower middle class is take a trip. People will always want to see new places. Our job is to make it easier for everybody. How we do that is we use technology. We'll use the technology. We'll make it easier. We'll enable more people to enjoy travel. One of the things will be is we'll have to really think about how do we handle the issue of too much travel? How do we handle the issues of certain parts of the world being the favorite place that everybody wants to go, which suddenly makes that place not such a great place to go? And we're seeing that even now, we're seeing that in Venice. We're seeing that in Amsterdam. We're seeing that in Barcelona. And the question is, how will we come up with what the fair way is so that we can best decide?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to try and make a guess about is it bubble or not? I do know in the 2000s there are a lot of people who said the internet's a fad. And you know, it didn't quite work out that way.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're one customer. There are many customers. There are many uses. I'll say this: it's very difficult to predict the future and make predictions, especially about the future. And I really say that many times people have thought of the limits on the possibilities, and they've been proven wrong. And the idea in the 1960s, if somebody told you you're going to have a thing in your pocket in 50 years that's going to have more computer power than what we're using to try and get to the moon. And you're going to be able to talk to anybody on the Earth. You're going to be able to send video and like real video. How many people would have believed that was possible? I bet not many. The same way. I bet that people in the 1890s could never envision that in 30 years there'll be these manned machines in the air flying around, right? There's so many things. I think we limit ourselves sometimes to the possibilities. So in terms of valuation, I'm not.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, thought about this sort of the macro level. Do you think that the kind of needs that you will have in the future for customer service will support the valuations and investments the big AI companies are putting forward right now? There's a paper from Goldman that came out that said this math doesn't make any sense at all. You're in it. You're the customer. Do you think there's enough demand for those valuations?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work, everyone you probably ever heard of, and probably some of you may not have were always talking, we may not have signed a contract with the board, always discussing possibilities. Again, we meet a lot of advances, but I believe we are still in the very, very early stages of what the possibilities are down the road. And I'll bet there's some of the companies that are going to become the big winners have been invented yet.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Justifiably sometimes, and they may say things that would upset the agent, and the agent may then yell back if it's a human. The machine's never going to yell back. It's always going to be nice and it's never going to come with a bad attitude with its spouse in the morning. It won't come really tired, could have stayed out too late the night before. I tell you, there are a lot of benefits to having an AI agent versus a human. And I hope we'll get there.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, it pays off when you start getting the simple things done, which we're already doing right away because that means that I won't have to hire as many new customer agents to handle as divide and increases. We won't have to increase the number of CS agents at the same rate because the simpler cases will be handled by these AI customers of agents. And at some point, gradually, gradually, gradually it'll get better and better while the need cure and cure. And it'll be something that I think will be better for the customer because I don't know anybody who ever enjoyed waiting on hold to speak to someone to fix the problem. One of the wonders of doing an AI agent is that there'll be no hold time, right? That'll be a great thing. And by the way, the AI agent, it's never going to get angry back at the customer. Sometimes customers get really angry.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe you had dinner resume. Many link parks. And you imagine that generative AI human-like agent will be able to deal with all these things and all the possibilities tomorrow is not real. But in the not so distant future, yeah, I think we'll get there. It's just going to take some time.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, no. We are making huge investments because you won't be able to create these without working on it to make it out. I'm just saying we're not there yet. But we are getting some things that some of our customer service stuff is already going through that we're able to do simpler things with that. And I imagine the rate of advancement is going so rapidly. Maybe it'll be sooner than I think we'll actually be able to achieve some of these things. But it's very complicated stuff. Being able to, for example, if you have a flight that is delayed, being able to have an AIA agent go through all the permutations, kind of what the right things are, and all the other parts of the trip, because a trip is a chain of many different things. First, you have to get from your home to the airport and the plane takes you to the place. Then you have to get from the airport to your accommodations. Then when you get to the accommodation,”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That when is really important, right? A company like booking that needs to operate massive, scalable customer support for lines or chatbots, you are the target customer for the open AIs and the Googles and the Microsofts of the world. Like when I talk to them, they imagine you and all of their investment and their current market caps are predicated on their products being sold to you in a way that works. So I think it's important to know, like you're not ready to make that investment in their tech yet because you don't think it works.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunate because we do need it badly. I mean, look at what just happened the last couple days where things go down and people are upset and their customer service numbers go off the chart. Then you have to try and figure out okay, how are we going to fix this? And it requires a lot of humans to do it as opposed to the AI. Someday we'll be there though. Just not sure when.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A customer facing Can it do it? Because it doesn't, I don't, the proof isn't there yet to me. It can do simple things. So you can, let's say, I'll give you a good example, open table right now is working with an AI company and its restaurant partners. And if you want to make a change to your reservation, if it is one of the restaurants that has signed up for this, you will get that answer. You can do it just like that with a human-like voice talking to you. Say, I need to add a person to this reservation or I need to cancel this reservation or something. And that's then freeing up the duties, responsibilities of the host if you'd called the restaurant and wanted to tell them to change it instead of having talked to a human, the machine, the AI, generate AI is doing it for them. That's a good use case that shows it can be done. Now, lots of little ones, but the complicated ones were nowhere near that.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can do some of the things we want them to do, and they're doing them right now. I mean, I like the fact that when I get on a plane, I feel fairly safe because all the automated AI type systems in that plane work pretty darn well, and it flies pretty well. That's a good thing. But in terms of what you think would be less complicated with some sort of generative AI customer service, specifically that's what I mean.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“End on the AI piece, which you mentioned several times investment every company is making. The idea that I have a problem when I travel and I can just speak in natural language to an assistant that will help me solve that problem. It's very powerful. I understand why you would be investing in that. There's a lot of steps between here and there. So let me just ask the first foundational question. Do you think the AI systems we have today can actually do the things you want them to do? Because that seems like the most open question of all.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me say this first. I'm an expert in the Taylor Swift economics, so I understand there is actually a course at one of the top business schools. I think that was looking at a case about the economy. Your point about people flying to Europe, I do know somebody who flew to Brazil for the Taylor Swift and did end up being cheaper flying to Brazil, going to the concert there, coming back than it would have been to buy similar seats in the New York, oh, I think it was New York, I know where it was in the US. Here's the thing though I don't know that it's because of any changes in regulations about ticket selling or monopoly. I have no idea how much I can't speak to that. I can.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a law degree. Remember, the New York State Bar, nothing against lawyers. I'm just saying that in terms of, you know, hey, look, in the end of the day, we do need lawyers and we do need rules and our society is better off because we actually live by the rule of law. Those societies are better, and I'm in favor of that. It's just like to have smart laws.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree. I agree. They do, they do. But, you know, but the thing is, though, I'd rather have that money unengineers to make better products.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it never used to be anytime at all back in the day. I mean, back in the day, this never came up. And now it starts to come up once the factor must be bigger, one's part of it, because as you point out, the world has changed a little bit. And it does take time. And it's thinking these things through and dealing with lawyers, people who are public affairs feel, we never had public affairs department until relatively recently. And our legal department's expanded a great deal. Part of the problem is, though, is that we prefer to spend that money on hiring engineers and create better services, unfortunately, when we have to spend a lot more money, not just with hiring lawyers, but hiring outside counselors, et cetera. That's money that can't be used to make better products and services for society.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you buy that, that's going to increase your ability to sell hotels a little true. There's some benefit to it, of course. I can't deny that. And the regular said it'll be increase your share by 1% to 2%. That was their opinion. That was their decision. And therefore, you shouldn't be able to buy and you're not going to be able to buy that. Now, my interest to that is that makes very little sense given a lot of our competitors have both flights and hotels and by us buying this flight company would enable us to make a much better flight service with our capital, with our technology, with what we know how to do. We'd make it even better for the consumers and we provide more competition to the flight business. Well, we're appealing that one too. So we'll see. Come back in a few years. I'll let you know how it worked out.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go the other way. We were an eight, we were blocked, literally blocked by the EU from buying a relatively small flight travel service. It's called eTraveli in Sweden. We wanted to buy it $2 billion, which relatively small size compared to the size of our capital. And also what's interesting is a very competitive market. There's no shortage of ways to buy an airline ticket in Europe or anywhere, okay? But here's the thing. They said, well,”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very few companies ever become of a type that can become an IPO. So the general way people are able to get their investment out is through the sale of that company. And by lowering the ability of big companies to buy these startups, smaller companies, et cetera, and enable this whole cycle of capital being allocated to new ideas, creating new service, new products, then it be bought by a larger company and that money flows back to the venture world and creates new companies. That whole cycle is being disrupted, can be disrupted by this idea of, well, we're not going to allow profitable big companies to buy anything. That's a bad idea. And I think it's naive of some people to believe that there'll be no consequences to this.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think you're right that there definitely has been a trend over the last few years in Europe, in the US, and in other parts of the world that has changed what used to be thought of something that was a good idea of allowing mergers and acquisitions to enable better services to the customers. to now being, wait a minute, maybe it's a squashing competition. Look, it all comes down to the individual cases. And what we don't want to do is enable monopolies to continue to entrench their monopoly power. On the other hand, what we don't want to do is destroy what is a very important part of the entire tech ecosystem, which is enabling people to create new businesses, get venture capital money to form these companies, become somewhat successful, but recognize that you need an exit and very, very, very, very,”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned politics and talking about regulation versus politics, but it is election season in the United States. Booking holdings is a holding company. It's a company formed of acquisitions. Right now under the Biden administration, acquisitions are somewhat disfavored. It's hard to get them through, although I will say Microsoft was able to buy Activision, which is a pretty big acquisition that occurred under the Biden administration. But it's generally harder to get them through. Are you looking at, okay, we got to make more acquisitions? I hope that climate changes, because around the world, in Europe, the United States, these big kind of deals are disfavored in favor of more competitors.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could work out that way. It could be something that way. I think the way we were doing it though was a very good way to do it because the only, yeah, the way this is called, by the way, narrow parity. We've only had narrow parity. We weren't saying that they couldn't have lower prices with other websites and other competitors. We're just saying like if we're going to have a partnership with you, hotels, we'd really like it to be that people don't use our service to do everything, then just jump over to you, frictionless, to go over and get cheaper. But okay, look, this is the rule. This is the law. It'll be this way.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just broadly step back out of your role as CEO of these companies. You talked about needing rules and make sure the game is fair. Doesn't that seem like the right outcome that the companies are under more pressure to deliver more value”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and you never know. We may just lower the price ourselves while that may give us a price. And we have X percentage of commission. Maybe we take some of the money out of our own pockets so we make sure that the customer still gets the same price. We'll figure it out as we go along. But I definitely believe that you have to provide better value if you don't. Why isn't we going to?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well I got to tell you, I know there's a long history of arguments about price parity, especially in Europe where you operate. The way you describe it, it doesn't sound bad, right? Like you might pay a higher price on your property, but you know that you have to earn that money.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And more things so they continue to use us. And at the end of the day, maybe this is good for actually society, more competition. I don't know. It is what it is. It's a rule. We're following it. And I still believe, though, in the end, the best thing is provide a better way to do travel. And that's how you win in the long run.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one other thing, though, is what would be really bad for us is if you price below the price you give to us, well, what will happen is people will use us to figure out which hotel they want and then they'll just click over to you and get a cheaper price. And that in the end, we won't then get the commission because they booked it with you, et cetera. So we'd like you to. That was called parody. And the DNA says can't have that parody. And we're like, really? Okay, well, in some countries, we didn't have that. So now what was happening, though, is because other countries, we'd already dropped that parity. We saw there wasn't much of a change actually in the business. But one of the things we want to do is we'll have to continue to give more benefit to our customers so they still have a reason to book with us. And now, of course, we can match the price at a hotel lowers the price. Well, then we can lower the price too. We'll do that or we'll provide more services.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are certain requirements, certain information. I can go through the whole list of the DMA. But again, what I'm saying is I don't think it's going to change or there's hugely. I'll give you an example that it changes. So one of the things that we have in the past, we've said to hotels, for example, we'd say, look, here's the deal. We'd love to do business with you. We'll translate all your content. We will give you lots of advice on what photos to put in. We will make sure that you can try and get customers from all over the world and provide incremental demand. And we're not going to ask for any money at all right now. We'll do all that for you and we'll spend a fortune in marketing so you'll get more customers. The one thing is though, the one thing is though, if you do get a customer, we'd like you to pay a commission. So there's no risk. And, you know, you'll get almost all the money yourself just a little bit of a commission.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll see. We'll see it just happened in terms of law came to effect not that long ago and then the companies have six months after being named a gatekeeper to make certain changes. And then the EU regulators have a chance then to examine it. We'll see. It's very early to know how these rules are going to play out.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just seems strange to me that that's a rule that's not good. So, what we want is regulations that actually are effective of achieving what their goal is, not coming up with something that is a proxy for it and ends up actually making things worse in terms of when you start segregating out different companies in different areas. And we'll see. Of course, politics plays a big role in a lot of this.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During the pandemic, and the world needs more pilots. So in parts of the world, there is a regulation that no matter what, if you're 65 years old, you can no longer be a commercial pilot. Now, the idea is what? Well, we want to have safety. We want to have aviation safety. And then you take that, well, we don't want pilots who are too old to fly. And then I just came up with a 65. But here's the thing. There's somebody one day after they're 65, suddenly they no longer are able to fly. And the day before they were able to go fly, that doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it. They're probably a lot like 65 year olds who actually can do their job flying and that their health is perfect and fine. And so maybe the rule should be something that actually talks about capabilities and health and really make it. So we want safety first. Absolutely. But maybe just having an arbitrary 65 would just put together property. God knows how many decades ago, maybe 65 year olds really shouldn't be applying.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a sports game without rules, right? I mean, let's go soccer is an easy one. That's your rule that you can't pick up the ball because if you can pick up the ball and run with it, then it's not soccer anymore. Then it's something else, right? So that's okay. So the thing on my thing on regulations, though, is I want the rules to be the same for everyone. I don't like it when certain companies are governed one way, other companies are governed another way. That gives a bias for one versus the other. I don't see really need. Now sometimes it seems that we have to do that because this company is so large and actually has a monopoly position. And I say, okay, now I understand that kind of makes sense. But then we look at ourselves. We're not a monopoly. Are you kidding me? Even more so, which is sometimes regulations really don't, they're set up for a reason that's a good reason, but it doesn't work so well in practice. I'll give you an example that right now there's a shortage of pilots, commercial pilots, a lot retired.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's the thing while we certainly were not pleased with being called a gatekeeper, what is one of the most competitive industries in the world, the idea that we have such a as the regulators alleged that we have a dominant position. And I'm like, well, do you feel that you don't have another way to get travel? I mean, really? But that's the way it is. Okay. So we have to follow the rules and we are following the rules and we are doing all the things necessary for that. And I don't see it as being a huge issue for us at this time. But I do see on principle it's unfortunately going to something that I said several times. I don't think this was the optimal solution they were searching for. You know, it's interesting about regulations. I'm in favor of regulations in general. You can't have like, yeah, let's go back to sports. Sure.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't pay for API access, but what's interesting in your case is you say yes, that is the first, that was the jury decision. Fortunately, we're not done yet. We'll be appealing this. So it's not over till it's over on that one”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That people should be able to get information as cheaply as possible, but I also understand the issue that people have ownership of proprietary information they have created. They should not be forced to share it. But if I do put something out to the public, then I have essentially given it out to everyone that anybody should be able to use it. It's interesting question. This whole generative AI thing is going to be a very interesting case because as we've seen some of these cases go around, the training models, the training sets for these models is, well, should somebody have gotten paid for training that information for the model or not? I don't know how these court cases are going to come out. I certainly am as interested as the next person in what these type cases are going to result in.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Ryanair case had nothing to do with scraping. So if you read the actual case, it had to deal with a 1980s law that dealt with whether or not somebody can access information using a password. And did that create a problem for the user dealt with things of hacking back in the 80s? What's interesting in that case, though, while we're not pleased with the way it came out, I don't know if you saw the amount of damages $5,000, literally $5,000. I mean, really, I mean, unbelievable. Here's the thing is, I like the idea.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one L, but there's so many things. You know, we go all the way the other way. One of the worst things for people on travel is a problem. And if you're not there to solve that problem, they booked it with you, but you don't solve for them. They're never coming back to you. So one of the great things you provide to a customer is assurance that if something goes wrong, you'll be there to help fix it for them and they won't be out on their own trying to fix it. That's a real value. No search engine does that. That's a big difference. And in fact, one of the reasons people say, and I don't know, I've never gotten this from Google, but I can say, you know what reasons Google does not go further into the actual transaction? They don't want to deal with that actual messy, messy part of customer service. Now that may be true or may not. Certainly I can understand why somebody, it's a hard thing to do well. But once you do do it well, you have an advantage.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, of course, there's always the fear again, nobody ends up wanting to end up beholden to somebody else. Let's use a different example. How many times do we hear people complain about Google and they say, I hate this. I have to spend all that money with Google to get a customer. If only they would come to me directly. I need to spend it. I hate being beholden to Google. That's no different than anything else. Everybody wants to be able to make sure that their customers come to them and they don't want it to pay for how they're going to get there. But the nature of competition is such if somebody doesn't put money into Google, they're going to lose out on business. If somebody doesn't want to work with us, that's perfectly their result thing. But if I can provide incremental value to them, they will generally want to do business with us.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say who would give me a helm? No, I tried here's the thing. Think about the technology difference. Look, thousands and thousands of thousands and thousands of people are coming up or doing engineering stuff to create a better way to do travel in our companies. Most companies have nowhere near. And the people they do have to spend a lot of their time making sure that they're owned just basic bread and butter technology stuff is working fine. So we can provide these types of services to other suppliers in a way that's cheaper and better they could do on their own.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even the biggest, we and I won't say who we've had some of the largest changes in the world come and ask us to abide certain types of services because we can do it better than that. I mean, think about the technology basis.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because those companies are big enough to do the marketing, they can probably figure out how to accept WeChat payments. They are inherently international. They can convert the money into Swiss francs and probably do some Forex leveraging and arbitrage, right? Like they're big enough to compete with you on the services that you say you're providing.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I also don't know is that we've been growing very rapidly and expanding. The reason they don't know is because in the US we're not as big in the homeless area as we are in other parts of the world. But if you want a home, we can provide you with a home too. So really at the end of the day is what does the customer want? That's what our job is to provide them what they want. We will provide the value so they can get it better from us than they could otherwise. Because let's face it, getting, as I say, what we're doing is in information transaction and going out and getting information is very, very inexpensive nowadays. Another way to say that is we're just, the customer is just one click away from somebody else.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're doing neither. What we're doing is providing what the customer wants, the customer wants a marriage, wants a hilt, wants a we have great relations with Hilton every single international chain. We are a big supplier customers to them. If the person wants a small boutique, we can provide that.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big hotels are reading, right? But it's the big hotels that are the kind of the problem, right? Like the American traveler is probably looking for brands that they recognize. They might be looking for the Hiltons or the Marriott's. Or you think they're all, but what I'm getting at is basically, are you selling a more boutique experience? Are you selling the cheapest experience?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't use the euro. But that's the thing. That's the thing. You have to think about that all the different ways things are done. So no hotel goes out and makes its own electricity. Why? Because it's cheaper to get the electricity from the utility, right? Well, we provide customers that they would not be able to get or if they could, it would cost a lot more than us providing for them.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. You got to give added value. No one is going to use your service no matter what it is unless the person thinks they're going to get value. And the value to provide is incremental customers that they could not have gotten their own way or they wouldn't have gotten as cheaply as they got it from us. So let's give an example here. Let's say you're a small hotel in Switzerland. How are you possibly going to get Chinese travelers? What do you do? You're marketing Chinese? You speak Chinese. We do 44 languages, right? How you can do the customer service? You're going to have your customer service people do Chinese customer service? I don't think so. So there's so many different things. How about payments? Let's do that one. It's a good one too. Small Swiss hotel. Do they take Ali Pay? Probably not. Did he Weech out pay? Probably not. We'll take the money from the customer in China. We'll put euros into the bank account of a Swiss hotel. Because Swiss.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, do you go to those partners and say, look, we know you want to go direct, but the law of the world is you have to pay for marketing? Or do you say we're going to bring you more customers in this rate is worth it?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT